Exploring the conditions for PhD-students to develop abilities to independently formulate research questions

Abstract

Developing an ability to independently formulate research questions is an important goal in doctoral education. During a seminar in the “Docent course”, accredited by Genombrottet at Lund University, the authors behind this paper ended up in a discussion on the actual conditions for developing such ability. During the discussions, the authors, based on their own experiences, identified several conditions that could hamper the PhD-students’ abilities to develop the skills required to independently formulate research questions. Examples of such conditions were: involvement in projects where objectives and deliverables already were stated by a funder, a lack of discussions with supervisors early in the PhD-process, and/or a lack of proper training. The authors also discussed if working with a compilation thesis automatically lead to contrived overall research questions, which resulted primarily as an afterthought at a very late stage in the process.